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India: Coalition unites to block PPP water privatization schemes

January 25, 2016

According to Corporate Accountability International, groups plan a series of escalating events to expose the truth about Nagpur’s failed PPP water privatization scheme promoted by the Modi government and World Bank. A group of trade unions in India is addressing a global petition to the World Bank.

NAGPUR, India—The Nagpur Municipal Corporation Employees’ Union (NMCEU), 25 Nagpur grassroots civil society groups, and organizations from across India kicked off mid-January two weeks of escalating events to demonstrate the failure of Nagpur’s Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) water privatization scheme, including a call for the contract’s cancellation and the utility’s remunicipalization.

The events, part of a nationwide push, are bolstered by a global petition signed by more than 700 organizations from 20 countries and more than 18,000 individuals.

The escalation, endorsed by affiliates of Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF) and Public Services International (PSI), is the latest in a global movement to protect the human right to water from PPPs and similar forms of water privatization.

"PSI supports the Nagpur workers union and all of the allied organisations in India seeking to raise the alarm about the World Bank’s misguided support for privatisation and so-called Public-Private Partnerships. We remain mystified as to why the Bank refuses to learn from its mistakes, from its own research. Perhaps, as a bank, it sees this as a good way to move loans, even if they won’t likely reduce poverty. However, workers and community activists will work to stop the spread of privatisation across India," says Rosa Pavanelli, PSI General Secretary.

In the same sense Jammu Anand, president of NMCEU, a member of PSI that has opposed the Nagpur municipal authority’s water privatization—managed by Orange City Water Pvt. Ltd.—for the last eight years says that “in Nagpur, the PPP scheme has enabled companies to squeeze profits from what should be a public water system, while workers suffer and families struggle to pay unaffordable bills or withstand life-threatening water shutoffs”. He adds that the idea of the Indian government "to expand the Nagpur model—a glaring violation of the fundamental human right to water—to hundreds of cities and millions more people across India is simply dangerous and puts corporate profit before human life”.

“In the pursuit of these water privatization projects, the World Bank continues to confuse ‘development’ with profit,” says Shayda Naficy, a water privatization expert at Corporate Accountability International. “For years it has ignored the concerns of the people most affected by this dogmatic pursuit, but with people across the globe raising their voices, it can't run from the truth any longer.”

The World Bank’s president Dr. Jim Yong Kim, chief economist Kaushik Basu, top water official Junaid Ahmad, and country director for India Onno Ruhl have neglected to respond to a December invitation issued by the Nagpur-based organizations to receive testimony about the water PPP from Nagpur residents at an event in the city on January 29th.

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Public Services International is a global trade union federation representing 20 million working women and men who deliver vital public services in 154 countries. PSI champions human rights, advocates for social justice and promotes universal access to quality public services. PSI works with the United Nations system and in partnership with labour, civil society and other organisations.